Today was our first cultural immersion day for class. It was great for us because it meant we did not have to sit in class for three hours! We also got to do a lot of exploring, shopping and eating, and I am always ok with those things as well. :) So at 9:30 this morning we set out for our four-hour cultural immersion trip near the Capitol. We met our professor at the bus stop in San Jose, and then as we were walking to the bus stop for Moravia we stopped at a bookstore where I bought Anne Frank to read to improve my Spanish reading skills, and we met a local author. He used to work on a banana plantation and he wrote about his experiences. Maria bought one of his books and got his signature, so I am hoping to borrow it and read it as well. Now the first thing about Costa Rican culture is their laid back approach to what needs to get accomplished, and I think that my professor got her masters in this. She is much more concerned about what is in front of us than the objectives on the syllabus. Sometimes this is beneficial, and sometimes this is very challenging for us study abroad students, but today it was a good thing. So after the bookstore, we went to a store to buy shoes for a girl that goes to the place Maria and I volunteer at, as Maria discovered she has no shoes that fit her well, so all of the students are chipping in to help pay for a pair. Now remember we were not in a hurry to do any of this and by the time we got off the bus in Moravia to start our cultural immersion it was already noon.
Once we arrived in Moravia we went to a Christian bookstore at mine and Emily's request and then to a different store to buy an umbrella for Maria, and then we went to Los Machetes for lunch. Los Machetes offered us a nice, quiet place out of the rain, and good typical food. I got to have some of my favorite Mora (blackberry) juice, and plantains! I am getting very accustomed to the food here and find myself enjoying it a lot. In fact after last weekend and eating a lot more United Stated cuisine I was actually excited to get back to my host family and have rice! My stomach was too, the rich food is kinda hard to digest.
You can see that Maria is enjoying her fresh juice too!
So after 1 pm we were finally ready to start the actual immersion activities my professor had planned, but since we had been talking about rescue workers during lunch she decided to go across to the street to the red cross and see if we could interview someone there. Well she found a very unlucky volunteer medic that was forced to sit down with us. He is a 20-year-old medical student, and his supervisor made him speak in English, while our professor made us speak in Spanish so we all could practice. It was a great time and we learned a lot. We learned a lot about the emergency response system, funding, ambulance system, and education for medical careers. After spending at least three hours a day together, not including extra activities or weekend trips, my classmates and I know each other fairly well and have developed many jokes. Fortunately, he was not deterred by the four foreigners battering him with questions and he laughed (a lot) at many of our jokes. In the end another medic and their supervisor came in and talked more about Costa Rica in general and we pretty much spent the rest of the afternoon there.
After the Red Cross, we went and spoke with the Vice Mayor and her secretary, but our professor said, we had to keep it short! Well she spoke quickly, and had an accent I am not accustomed to, so I understood little of what she said, and in general, we were all pretty tired by this point so we kept our questions for a minimal, but it was a very neat experience.
After this, we went to a church and a park to see a little more of the city. I have come to appreciate the honest view that Latin Americans have on life and death, and that they do not try to sugar coat things the way that I am accustomed too. I am not sure if it is just their culture, or perhaps the Catholic Church, because I am not accustomed to that either, but at the church, they had fairly graphic statue displays of different pieces of the passion of Jesus Christ. I really enjoyed going around and looking at them and being reminded of the price that Jesus paid for me, and what that cost Him. There was one of Pontius Pilote washing his hands while looking at Jesus, and this one stuck out to me the most.
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